Well the Missus and I trundled down to Brockton yesterday to catch the current exhibitions at the Fuller Craft Museum and say, they were swell.
Let’s start with Glass Lifeforms 2021 (through April 24).
Glass Lifeforms 2021 features contemporary artworks inspired by Harvard University’s acclaimed collections of plant and invertebrate models produced in the 19th and 20th centuries by Czech glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. An open call exhibition, Glass Lifeforms 2021 includes artists working in various glass techniques, including lampworking, glassblowing, pâte de verre, and others. Exhibited works were selected by a jury based on accuracy in representing the organism, aesthetic beauty, presentation, and originality.
Representative samples from the exhibit feature all those characteristics.
You should really see the exhibit in person to appreciate the amazing level of technical skill and, er, craftsmanship involved. This video provides a taste of it: Project organizer and exhibiting artist Sally Prasch gives an exhibition preview, followed by a panel discussion in which the exhibition jurors “share insights about the jurying process, scientific glass blowing, and artists’ enduring fascination with the natural world.”
Also on exhibit at Fuller Craft is Under New Management: The Commodification of the Permanent Collection (through April 3).
Under New Management: The Commodification of the Permanent Collection features works from Fuller Craft’s collection selected by guest curators and Boston-area artists Oliver Mak, Kenji Nakayama, and Pat Falco. Operating as a fictitious marketing company, MFN Integrated Solutions, the curatorial team aims to activate the collection while challenging the perception of museums through exhibition curation and design, including promotional posters created by artists/sign painters Nakayama & Falco as retail advertisements for each artwork. By reframing the works as commodities, the exhibition disrupts the oft-opaque nature of cultural institutions and offers new ways of looking at museum objects.
Representative samples:
Check out the entire virtual catalogue – it’s a hoot.
Amy Genser: Shifting (through December 3, 2023) is a monumental installation in which the Connecticut artist “works with paper and paint to explore her ongoing obsession with texture, pattern, and color. Using paper as pigment, she layers, cuts, rolls, and combines the humble material into vibrant tableaux that are inspired by the natural world—the flow of water, the shape of beehives, the organic irregularity of plants, and more.”
Like this:
It’s even more impressive up close.
Last but not least is Melissa Stern: The Talking Cure.
This multimedia exhibition by New York artist Melissa Stern combines the visual, literary, and performance arts and a spirited cast of characters formed from clay. Taking its name
from Sigmund Freud’s original description of psychoanalysis, The Talking Cure centers Stern’s twelve ceramic sculptures, each one born from her own imagination. To bring them to life, the artist invited twelve writers to create inner monologues for each of the characters and twelve actors to perform them for audio recordings. Viewers are encouraged to scan QR codes to listen to the audio performances in order to inhabit the artists’ minds and become part of the characters’ worlds.
Full disclosure: the Missus and I didn’t have time to either scan or listen. But another museumgoer did both and seemed totally engrossed in the audio performances.
Either way, well worth a trundle.
Campaign Outsider 